A receiver technician works on the methanol multibeam receiver package at the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope

Receiver packages, like this, are placed at the focus of the radio telescope, and convert incredibly weak radio energy into an electrical signal, which is then amplified before being sent to the tower for recording. The radio energy is naturally produced in space by celestial objects such as stars, pulsars and clouds of gas.

This receiver is a special seven-beam receiver capable of observing seven points in space at once and is tuned to observe at frequencies emitted by clouds of methanol in space. It was jointly constructed by the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility and the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom.